jeffy

When I was writing this entry about the ongoing evolution of a new relationship, I spent a long long time trying to figure out where the edges of the story were. Did the story start when I first met N six years ago? Did it start when I first encountered the concept of polyamory whenever that was? How much of the makeup of my mindset must be understood for a reader to make sense of the story? How much of my personal history?

I have done very little writing (or even telling) of stories, so these are things that I'm not used to considering. It was a huge obstacle to my settling down and telling the story. It gave me a renewed appreciation of the art of story telling and the skill of the practitioners of that art.

You writers, how do you deal with this problem of where to start and how much to tell?

I finally settled on the approach of writing a linear narrative with as little background and digression as I could manage, but in order to do that I had to intentionally prune the branches of those distractions so I wouldn't keep getting dragged away from my main point. I marked the stumps of these tangents with note numbers, and stuck the labelled branches in a corner so I could get back to them if they kept seeming interesting. It was surprisingly freeing to jot a number in parentheses and a corresponding phrase or two. I found I really could put them down and move on once I'd assured my brain that I could get back to that later. (This is a concept that flows straight out of David Allen's Getting Things Done methodology)

I'm going to start trying to grow some of my notes into their own entries or series of entries. This entry is from note 1 in that post, in case you want to keep track.